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The Forest & Garden Continuum How we can conne ct landscap e s on campus and in hear ts and minds . By Caroline Tait, Vice President, Horticulture & Collections
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n walking the grounds at Holden Arboretum one is amazed by the range of plants in the highly designed cultivated gardens. HF&G’s Living Collection is displayed in representation of a green living museum. However, we host and care for many additional plants of native and natural occurrence throughout the Arboretum Core. These are visible in a series of forested areas, which connect the cultivated gardens. In a much broader scale one can recognize this in our residential landscapes, too — gardens connected by wild, often lightly forested, spaces.
It became apparent that we have an opportunity to offer HF&G guests a close-up introduction to the options available to manage this type of space. If an interest is piqued, then the Working Woods program can teach larger scale action in woodlands for aesthetic and economic benefits. Ensuring that any program within a department utilizes the best of knowledge from across HF&G teams means our guests receive the best of current management understanding, and our horticulture teams can implement our scientist’s research. Science and Horticulture are points on a continuum of understanding the land.
Public Gardens as Sentinels of Invasive Plants By Tom Arbour, Curator of Living Collections
I stepped into the role of Curator of Living Collections last September following a career focused on natives, invasives and land management across Ohio, and am excited to curate our Living Collection of more than 20,000 accessioned plants and trees. My key responsibility is to ensure the Living Collection reflects HF&G’s mission to, ultimately, inspire action for healthy communities. As I begin developing collections plans for each of the individual genera — Quercus, Malus, Rhododendron etc., it is critically important that plants chosen for ex-situ conservation, i.e. conserved on campus outside of their native range, stay in our gardens and do not spread into our natural areas or the communities we serve. HF&G has taken a lead in recognizing invasive plant species across cultivated and natural landscapes. Norway maple, Japanese barberry, winter creeper and Callery pear are among the dozens of plant taxa that have been removed from our Living Collection
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although it can take longer for the commercial industry to take these steps. In recent years, Horticulture & Collections staff have collaborated with other public gardens to help sound the alarm about plants that are escaping cultivation locally. This network, known as Public Gardens as Sentinels against Invasive Plants, provides both monitoring protocols and an online database for public gardens to submit information about these plants that ‘may “go wild.” Plants are categorized as‘‘watchlist,’ ‘potentially ‘invasive’ and ‘invasive’ based on a number of criteria, including information collected by Holden’s staff about the number of plants that have escaped cultivation and how far they have spread from the parent plant. The PGSIP guidance will be implemented throughout the Arboretum Core across gardens and connecting forest fragments.
